.NET Tips and Tricksby Peter Vogel

Spell Check Your Comments in Visual Studio

While I’m opposed to writing comments in code, even I recognize the value of comments placed on a class or method declaration (I’m excluding properties because most don’t require commenting). Presumably, if you’re writing these comments it’s with the hope that someone will, someday, read them ... and it would be awfully embarrassing if you misspelled things in those comments.

If that sounds like a problem worth addressing, go to Visual Studio’s Tools menu and select the Extensions and Update menu choice. In the resulting dialog, select Online from the tabs on the left and enter “Spell Check” (with the space in the middle) in the search box. You’ll get a list of spell checkers that you can add to your applications but, in Visual Studio 2017, you’ll also get Eric Woodruff’s Visual Studio Spell Checker. It’s an extension of an earlier spell checker for Visual Studio (and that earlier version is still available through GitHub if you don’t find it in Extensions and Updates).

After downloading the extension, you’ll need to shut down Visual Studio and wait patiently for Visual Studio’s installer to appear. Clicking the Modify button in the installer window will install Spell Checker. Once you restart Visual Studio, you’ll find a new Spell Checker choice on Visual Studio’s Tools menu with a sub-menu containing lots of options.

If you pick the option to spell check your whole solution, then you’ll find that Spell Checker checks all comments and all strings -- probably finding more errors than you care to do anything about (for example, I wouldn’t consider “App.config” in a comment to be an error). Fortunately, you can train Spell Checker to ignore words (like, for example, “App.config”) or configure what Spell Checker checks (through Tools > Spell Checker > Edit Global Configuration).

You can find it more about Spell Checker here. It would be a shame if some later programmer thought less of you because you spelled something wrang.